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During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99%: Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!
Images of the Day:
Quotes of the Day:
Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. — Frederick Douglass, The Hypocrisy of American Slavery, July 4, 1852
Videos of the Day:
Danny Glover Condemns Decision to Cover Controversial Mural at His Former High School Actor and San Francisco native Danny Glover at a press conference on Tuesday, August 13, condemned a decision made by the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education to remove a mural at his former high school portraying slavery. The controversial mural at George Washington High School, painted in 1937, shows a series of vignettes of President George Washington’s life, including depictions of slavery and servitude, deceased indigenous persons, and violence, according to reports. The school board initially decided to paint over the mural, saying it didn’t “represent the school’s values,” according to a report from SFGate. While some groups reportedly argued that the mural was racist, violent, and detrimental to students, others, including actor and alumnus Danny Glover, disagreed with the decision to cover it up. Glover was reported as saying the mural needed to be preserved as an “uncomfortable reminder” of the realities of history. At Tuesday’s press conference, Glover said:
“Fifty years ago, 20 years ago, we’d never have this discussion right now. Why are we having this discussion now? Why are we talking about boarding it up at this particular point? I think it’s absurd. To board it up? In some sense to hide it from our view? That’s basically what you’re saying.” “We don’t get enough history in our history books anyway. You can talk about any particular point in time in this history about the forming of this country and everything – it’s never the truth. It’s always the victor’s history, and that’s the history that we’re saying.” On Tuesday evening, the school board voted not to remove or paint over the existing mural, but to obscure it with different materials, according to a New York Times report
U.S.:
The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.— The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War! Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich!
Uncle Sam was Born Lethal One of the occupational and intellectual hazards of being a historian is that current events often seem far less new to oneself than they do to others. Recently a leftish liberal friend told me that the United States under the Donald Trump had “become a lethal society.” My friend cited the neofascist Trump’s: horrible family separations and concentration camps on the border; openly white-nationalist assaults on four progressive nonwhite and female Congresswomen; real and threatened roundups of undocumented immigrants; fascist-style and hate-filled “Make America Great Again” rallies; encouragement of white supremacist terrorism; alliance with right-wing evangelical Christian fascists. By Paul Street
Trump blinks again as the world economy stuttersStock markets have experienced a roller-coaster ride over the past two months, as Trump’s erratic trade policy has brought the world economy to the brink of recession. In the latest move, Trump yet again partially postponed the introduction of new tariffs, which he announced two weeks ago. This temporary reprieve will do little to solve the conflict. By Niklas Albin Svensson
Environment:
“Gold Over Life, Literally” The decision by Alaska’s governor Mike Dunleavy and US president Donald Trump to sacrifice the environment for a gold mine is an extremely bad one, but I understand why it has happened. The offshoring of Americans’ jobs to Mexico and Asia has put millions of Americans into a situation in which their livelihood is not assured. To open up protected environment and national monuments to mining is Trump’s only way of creating real jobs. The problem is that the external costs of the jobs in terms of ecological damage exceeds the value of the wages and mining output. In other words, the mining cannot cover its costs, but people devoid of alternative prospects cannot think about the future. The future is down the road, and many Americans are no longer confident they are going to be here down the road. For many, it is now or never. By Paul Craig Roberts
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
Economy:
Because the IMF would do what it calls stabilization programs. These were really destabilization programs. They would say, the country can pay the debt, you’ve already impoverished your workers to such a low level that you’re in a depression, there’s no internal market, you have to pay your debt by privatizing your public infrastructure. You have to sell off all of the natural monopolies that every country for hundreds of years has kept in the public domain. Not only the mineral rights and oil rights that were in the public domain but the transportation system the electrical system, especially, the ports, the airports, everything that was public should be sold to pay back the IMF for the subsidy of the capital flight by the wealthy. And most of this capital flight was into offshore banking enclaves that were set up by the U.S. government around, after 1964, when the Vietnam War was causing extreme balance of payment crisis. I was at the Chase Manhattan Bank at that time, and a State Department person came to me and said, the entire deficit of the Vietnam war is military. We have a problem. How are we going to pay for a military deficit all over the rest of the world? 800 military bases… They said there’s one liquid supply of capital throughout the world. There’s one class that has a higher savings rate than any other class. And that class is the criminal class. The drug dealers, organized crime, tax evaders, and corrupt government officials. And so, they decided, they said, what we will do is create offshore banking enclaves, very much like Panama and Liberia for the oil sector, which was already set up, but we’re going to set them up throughout the Caribbean. England did the same thing. So America established Caribbean islands with no taxation, no questions asked, little Panamas, little Liberias. And in England’s case, you had the British Caribbean islands declare independence, and then they reversed their independence so they could be part of the English area, and so that they would be using sterling and be exempt from any foreign exchange, any currency devaluation. So very quickly, the American Banks and the British Banks established branches in these islands that were very poor islands, and all of a sudden you had all these huge Bank branches there. So brokerage firms came to me and asked me to compute statistics. We would look at, you can look at the United States government and bank foreign liabilities too, like Anguilla and all of the other offshore banking enterprises Foreign liabilities means these are the deposits we have there. And you’d have foreign liabilities to their own banks and so the criminals, the drug dealers, the cocaine cartel, all sorts of… And tax dictators would put their money in the islands, in the banks. The island branches of the New York banks would then take this money and lend it to the head office, and this money was exempt from reserve requirements because it was foreign, and so it was a source of very inexpensive capital at the American banks. So it was really the United States that organized the world’s capital flight, offshore banking centers, and the IMF role was to support the dollar, to support the currency, and to support capital flight from other countries into the US dollar. — Michael Hudson, The Instrument of Empire
Should This Be Illegal – Banks Recommending a Stock to the Public then Secretly Trading It in their own Dark Pool? The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied 99.97 points yesterday but the mega Wall Street bank, Citigroup, closed in the red, down 0.15 percent. That decline follows a dramatic loss of 5.28 percent on Wednesday, a day that the Dow was down only 3.05 percent. Citigroup’s closing price yesterday was $61.32. The stock has lost more than 88 percent of its value since 2007, despite its attempt to dress up the share price with a 1-for-10 reverse stock split in 2011, which left its long-term shareholders with 1 share for each 10 shares previously held By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Yesterday’s Market Plunge Shines Harsh Light on Big Banks and their Derivative Counterparties As we’ve previously reported, five mega banks on Wall Street hold the fate of the entire financial system of the United States in their crony, frequently soiled hands. Yesterday’s trading action clearly showed the ugly warts between those banks and their derivative counterparties in the insurance industry. And even though their crony regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, allows the banks to trade their own stocks in darkness in their own internal Dark Pools, someone else clearly got the upper hand yesterday. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Daily Update (August 16th to 19th) – July 2019 Single-Unit Building Permits Gained 1.8% in the Month, Declined 3.8% (-3.8%) Year-to-Year, With Revised Second-Quarter Activity Holding Its Fifth Consecutive Quarter-to-Quarter Contraction / July CASS Freight Index™ Formally is “Signaling an Economic Contraction” / July Industrial Production, Manufacturing and Mining Declined on Top of Downside Revisions to Second-Quarter Activity / Annualized Quarterly Contraction in Second-Quarter Production Deepened from 1.2% (-1.2%) to 2.1% (-2.1%), Indicating a More-Intense Recession and Downside Revision to Second-Quarter GDP / Oil and Gas Drilling and Exploration Took a Hit / Capacity Utilization Dropped to a 21-Month Low / 0.70% Jump in July Retail Sales Was 0.37% Net of CPI Inflation / Real Annual Retail Sales Growth Held at 1.6%; Growth Below 2.0% Rarely Is Seen Outside of Formal Recessions / July CPI-U Inflation Rebounded Month-to-Month and Year-to-Year, Along With Gasoline Prices, as Did the PPI / Real Average Weekly Earnings Continued to Sink, on Early Track for a Second Consecutive Quarterly Decline
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living. 
World:
The Peterloo Massacre at 200: the barbaric legacy of British capitalism Today is the 200th anniversary of what has gone down in history as the Peterloo Massacre. This is one date that the ruling class has little desire to remember. Even now, two centuries on, a reminder of the bloodshed and violence associated with the history of British capitalism will be uncomfortable for the establishment. By Steve Jones
Health, Education, and Welfare:
The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let The People Vote on Healthcare!
